American film mogul Orson Welles famously said, “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” One might also posit the world of record keeping carries a similar burden of being pegged to extremes, perhaps somewhere between “forgettable” and “vital” to the layman.

Record-keeping in the digital age is full of some of the most intellectually complex challenges out there, as Chapman’s own archivist, Andy Harman, or the widely known Roy Rowsenzweig can tell you. ““Digital documents—precisely because they are in a new medium—have disrupted long-evolved systems of trust and authenticity, ownership, and preservation. Reestablishing those systems or inventing new ones is more difficult than coming up with a long-lived storage mechanism.”

But, this is a challenge the general public may never stop to consider until it impacts one’s life on a personal level. Perhaps the digital service one subscribes to for storing one’s most treasured photos fails or becomes prohibitively expensive and a decade of photos disappear without any other physical record. Or, as the time-capsule looking but still relevant documentary, Into the Future discusses how not maintaining records for old hazardous waste sites might lead to a contaminated housing development later such as the Love Canal incident. Would a homeowner suffering in a tragedy such that consider bad record-keeping the bad guy?

Rowsenzweig also gave this example on how the Federal government itself asserts the importance of record keeping but delivers an uneven performance in that obligation: “Although most government agencies started using e-mail and word processing in the mid-1980s, the National Archives still does not require that digital records be retained in that form, and governmental employees profess confusion over whether they should be preserving electronic files.” It made me remember a required, annual training State Department employees like myself must complete on understanding the record keeping process. It is probably one of the more difficult trainings despite its seemingly banal nature. The key area I had to constantly review when I got training questions wrong was essentially to better untangle what was considered a record that must be kept and follow and appropriate disposition schedule, and what was not. When some of the materials and terms actually include things like “non-records” and hybrid products (basically, when you have sent something using one’s work email but it contains both a mix of personal and work/record-worthy material), it becomes jarringly clear a three hour, asynchronous, online course on record-keeping is really just showing that this is a far more complex topic than it often gets credit for. Or, as Rowsenzweig sums up later: “Preservation of the past is, in the end, often a matter of allocating adequate resources. Perhaps the largest problem facing the preservation of electronic government records has nothing to do with technology; it is, as various reports have noted, “the low priority traditionally given to federal records management.””

There is a tenuous balance in decision making to be made with finite financial, human, and technological resources between how much of the past should be preserved in consideration of moving forward with other inquiries. The adage “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” echoes throughout this question. But, ever relevant too is the adage “out with the old, in with the new.” Does exerting too many resources to focus on preserving the past just make for a more academic version of hoarding? As the rate at which we can produce content digitally outpaces what we have time, ability, and desire to preserve, the importance of thoughtful decision stands out as the key tool to rescue us from drowning in data. There are no simple answers, but some thoughts that enter my mind in this discussion:

1. How does culture play a role in what we consider worth keeping?

While living in China, I was always upset at seeing how readily the government seemed to bulldoze historical parts of the city I lived in only to recreate what I would call a Disney-fied version of the same thing. Where I saw reckless version of “restoration” many of my Chinese friends and colleagues simply saw progress – show the best version of the concept there. However, this was complicated further in that some of the areas destroyed were specifically Uighur (non-Han Chinese/ethnic minority Muslim community) neighborhoods. In the context of what the Chinese central government is perpetrating in the Uighur cultural home of Xinjiang state now, it makes me wonder if it is closer to the example of how libraries, museums, and other cultural repositories in Bosnia were deliberately targeted as part of war per an example from Into the Future. This idea is further explored in the excellent war and society history called The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War.

2. Who decides what is kept and what goes into that decision making process? Is preservation of the past a public good or just a digital-age commodity?

Rowsenzweig  also frames the discussion of preserving the past as a discussion on what the value of the past is and to whom. “That scholarly engagement should also lead us, I believe, to public action to advocate the preservation of the past as a public responsibility—one that historians share.” But, in the example about NARA and the Federal government above show poor leadership by public institutions in preserving the past, is that an argument for private institutions or industry to take the lead? They certainly have more technological prowess and the ability to adapt quickly. But, Rowsenzweig chillingly points out something I had only begun to realize in the last few years about who impacts archival processes and what that says about the perception of authorship of knowledge. “It has put the future of the past—traditionally seen as a public patrimony—in private hands.” While I lack hope in Federal level effectiveness in preserving the past in terms of how quickly in can respond to what is needed, I tend to agree with Rowsenzweig that allowing private hands to control the collective past does not inspire confidence either.

3. Apart from the learning that informs our sense of progress, why do we generally keep things? Why are some people more content living life with fewer possessions while others cannot stop collecting things (physically or in other ways)?

I think the desire to find archival solutions speaks to our sense of mortality. We are constantly striving to find things that will outlive us. Not being reassured that our story will be shared after we pass away, or trying to make sure a piece of our history lives on, whether that be in what we bequeath physically, financially, or even digitally now, creates an anxiety that threatens our sense of memory, arguably more important than our physical life. I cannot seem to locate the source now, but I recall in some cultures of West Africa one is only considered to have passed away when the last person who knew that individual personally is no longer around. Digital record-keeping has the potential to maintain a legacy of individual history, if we can find a way to locate, appreciate, and manage each tree in a growing digital jungle.

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